The Silver Lining of Price Spikes: How electricity price spikes can help overcome the energy efficiency gap
Working paper
Åpne
Permanent lenke
http://hdl.handle.net/11250/227231Utgivelsesdato
2013-08Metadata
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- Discussion papers (FOR) [498]
Sammendrag
Studies
have
shown
that
many
consumers
and
businesses
fail
to
invest
in
energy
efficiency
improvements
despite
seemingly
ample
financial
incentives
to
do
so
–
the
so-‐called
energy
efficiency
gap.
Attempts
to
explain
this
gap
often
focus
on
searching
costs,
information
frictions
and
behavioral
factors.
Using
data
on
Norwegian
electricity
prices
and
Google
searches
for
heat
pumps,
I
suggest
that
the
inherently
spikey
nature
of
many
deregulated
electricity
markets
–
often
seen
as
a
sign
of
inefficiency–
has
a
strong
and
significant
positive
effect
on
searching
for
information
on
energy
efficiency
goods.
I
attempt
to
identify
the
informational/behavioral
effect
by
using
a
novel
method
of
measuring
spikiness:
decomposing
the
price
series
into
a
range
of
Loess
smoothed
series
and
deviations
from
these
curves.